Too many Conservatives find it hard to think beyond the tribal stockade – they
must learn to speak to those who despise them

Tomorrow, both houses of Parliament will pay tribute to Nelson Mandela and commemorate a man who, more than any other in recent memory, incarnated the spirit of common humanity. Such an occasion would have been quite unimaginable in 1964 to the young radical lawyer sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia trial. Now, almost half a century later, it is unimaginable that the British body politic should do anything less.

Since the news of Mandela’s death, I have been thinking about a passage in Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography that describes life on Robben Island in the early Seventies. For all the indignities that had been visited upon Mandela and his fellow prisoners in Afrikaans – in some cases, accompanied by beatings and torture – he grasped the importance of speaking to the warders in their native tongue.

“Mandela himself studied Afrikaans systematically,” writes Sampson, “reading many Afrikaans books, and spoke it quite well.” Even as he faced decades behind bars, isolated and confined, he was preparing himself psychologically for a different life. Knowing your foe helps you to defeat him; but it also paves the way to eventual reconciliation and trust.

The ability to step into the shoes of another – to think as someone else thinks – is one of the distinguishing features of true political greatness. In conflict, it is a strategic necessity; in modern democratic politics, it is a precondition of success. Twenty-seven of Mandela’s 95 years were taken from him by the wicked creed of segregation. His genius was to see that the future of South Africa, as of the world, had to be pluralist.

In this, as in so many ways, Mandela was the cartographer of the modern geopolitical map. Only a matter of weeks separated the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989 and his release on February 11 1990. That brief period marked the gestation and birth of a new era. The collapse of Soviet communism had not brought history to an end. But the great ideological divide that shaped the second half of the 20th century was no longer the defining template of global alignment and change.

As I wrote in June, when Mandela fell ill, his impact upon the politics of this country was huge. In 2000, he addressed the Labour conference in Brighton and expressed gratitude for the party’s support against apartheid. On the Conservative side, too many were suspicious of, or downright hostile to, Mandela for much too long. It is mincing words to suggest otherwise. Just as those who celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher behaved deplorably, so too the Conservatives who wore “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges – and those who just thought as much – did more damage than they knew to their party’s honour, as well as its electoral prospects.

The early Tory modernisers realised this and did their best to atone for their movement’s past errors. But it takes many years to wipe away such a stain, and the patience that Mandela personified is a scarce resource in modern politics. Many (perhaps most) Conservatives believe that the work of “detoxification” is over, having been dashed off in a couple of years, and look at the opinion polls in bafflement, puzzled by the party’s failure to persuade the electorate fully that its heart, its motives and its values are in the right place.

Victory eludes the Conservative Party because it has not learnt to think as the other guy thinks. Too many Tories still find it hard to think beyond the tribal stockade; or – much worse – assume that everyone beyond its boundaries thinks as they do. Just as Mandela learnt Afrikaans, they, too, must learn to speak to those who still despise them. The man whom David Cameron genuinely admired and described as “a hero of our time” still has lessons to teach his party.

Of course, his deep influence upon UK politics is only a small part of the story. Mandela went into prison as a figurehead of socialist struggle and national liberation and emerged as something much greater: the moral Magnetic North of a post-communist, post-colonial, interdependent world struggling to find fresh moorings and to face the challenges of globalisation. It is one thing to ask a man to free his own country; quite another to burden him with the expectations of an entire planet.

Much about Mandela, of course, was timeless. His leadership, though democratic, had much in common with the sacral kingship described in Marc Bloch’s great book, The Royal Touch. Long after his retirement, the politically scrofulous went to him hoping that some of the shamanistic magic would rub off.

For all this ancestral power, however, Mandela was a defining force of modernity and the figure who, more than any other, plotted the highway on which contemporary politicians now march. The division between Left and Right still matters, of course, but much less than it did and (more to the point) much less than some still hope.

The historic significance of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, for instance, has nothing to do with his position on the Left-Right spectrum. Look, too, at the victory of Bill de Blasio in New York and the backfiring of recent attempts to undermine Ed Miliband with reference to his father’s communism. It is no longer enough to tar your opponent as “Left-wing”.

That is because the frame has changed. The ideology of the 20th century is less important now than conflict resolution, the politics of ethnic and religious identity, the opportunities and risks of globalisation, and the challenges of unprecedented population mobility and social pluralism. In all these dilemmas, Mandela has more to tell us than Marx.

Millions learnt about his death on Twitter and other social media: transformative resources symbolic both of our unprecedented connectedness but also of the modern world’s impatience, shrillness and demand for instant gratification. Mandela stretched out a hand to everyone, but also, in the way that he lived, issued a warning against these 21st-century pathologies.

He represented the virtues of the long haul, of optimism (not the same as euphoria), of determination leavened by an open mind, of conviction matched by an extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. Such figures come along rarely in a century, let alone a generation. Where is the Mandela of the Islamic world who will steer it away from fanaticism to make peace with the infidel? He or she may not even have been born.

Yeats was right: peace comes dropping slow. It depends not only upon historical contexts, but upon extraordinary men and women willing to pay an extraordinary price. Quite properly, the loss of such a leader is the cause of worldwide mourning. But what endures is a sense of possibility, that greatness is to be found in humility as well as power; and that the binding force of the human spirit is not fear, but hope.